Word: plants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ziers, La Littorale, SA, a Union Carbide affiliate, stores some 20 tons of the chemical, which it imports from the U.S. because the French government prohibits the manufacture of MIC. La Littorale officials proudly point to the facility's extensive security features. The air in the plant is automatically monitored, and should any gas escape from a drum an alarm would call in a crack emergency team. If large enough, the leak would also trigger a water system to deluge and wash down the MIC. Declares Heinz Trautmann, president of La Littorale: "The situation in France is very different...
...quest for safety starts with plant construction. Whenever possible, chemical companies have tried to build factories away from population centers. Especially overseas, those factories often become magnets, attracting other business and housing. Says Jeffrey Leonard, senior associate at the Washington-based Conservation Foundation: "Many plants are located on the outskirts of cities only to have the sites overrun by bursting populations." Union Carbide officials point out that the Bhopal factory was built in the early 1970s on a site surrounded by unused public land, but a community grew up around it. At the .Pemex plant in Mexico, where an explosion...
Petrochemical companies attempt to build safety into their plants from the bottom up. Says Geraldine Cox, vice president and technical director for the Chemical Manufacturers Association, a trade group: "We try to design safety into our systems." That frequently means extensive redundancy-two valves, for example, where only one is needed. It means building storage tanks to withstand pressures and temperatures well above expected maximums. Adds Cox: "It's a process of calculating extremes, then designing beyond that." Every year the association reviews 1,200 engineering standards with an eye to making them sharper and tougher. American Cyanamid...
Residents of West Virginia's Kanawha Valley complain about the putrid smell that sometimes hangs over the area, comparing it to the odor of dead rats and rotten cabbage. But to many locals the sulfurous aromas spewing from a dozen plants spread along a 30-mile section known locally as Chemical Valley are still "the smell of meat and potatoes." That is because these factories pay the wages of 10,000 people in a state that suffers the highest unemployment rate in the nation (16%). Says Bob Harbert, 36, a cab driver in Nitro, W. Va. (named...
...west of Charleston. Most of its 500 permanent residents are black; an additional 300 people are handicapped and live at a local rehabilitation center; and 4,000 students attend nearby West Virginia State College. The town has three restaurants, two gas stations, one barbershop and a sprawling Union Carbide plant. It is the only site in the U.S. that produces methyl isocyanate, the deadly chemical that wafted through Bhopal, India...